Living with children in the house brings on a seemingly endless cycle of chores. Each day feels like an unraveling of the work I did the day before. It is an endless battle against entropy, a continual descent into disorder. The laundry bin is full again before I’ve even finished folding. No sooner do I clean up one meal than it feels like the next is being made. I finish cleaning one room, and the one behind me is in chaos.
I can feel that this work is meaningless, frustrating, or hopeless. I can get angry at the mess and my family for making it. I can get lost in self-pity as I live in constant clean-up mode.
Or I can take a deep breath and see the beauty inside the mess. After all, our lives are found in the folds of the laundry, in the dishes in the sink, and in the messes on the floor.
As I empty the laundry basket, I see parts of the ridiculous costume my husband wore on Halloween. It has the shorts with grass stains from my son’s soccer game – a reminder of the defensive slide tackle that kept the ball out of the goal. The butter stain on my daughter’s sweatshirt is from the toast she ate while we drove to school in the morning and talked about her new friendships. It has shirts with marker stains from coloring, leotards from gymnastics class, and pants with dirt stains from gardening.
The kitchen sink holds similar markers of our lives: the plate with Nutella from the crepes we ate for breakfast, the thermos with a couple of Spaghettios left inside, and the same coffee mug that I carry around with me all morning to multiple school drop-offs.
And finally, there is the mess on our family room floor. Rather than seeing a pile of papers, I can see the multiple drafts of a horse my daughter was trying to draw. I notice that the pile of Pokemon cards is carefully arranged and ranked, not randomly strewn around. I can notice the titles of books on the floor and feel proud of both my early readers and older bookworms.
